I’ve been staring at versions of this grid for weeks as my tiny happy place from the chaos of being inundated with holiday sales and horrific news cycles. Going online has felt so wild lately - you can’t really avoid swinging back and forth from images of violence and reports on the genoc… ncG1vNJzZmiZopavprjLnqqim5Gnsap60q6ZrKyRmLhvr86mZqlnpJ2ybrTIrKuoqqlivKd5xpqss51dnsButMCupa2hnpw%3D

Yin and Yang. Perhaps the most well-known element of Far Eastern philosophy. In harmony, good, and evil, positive and negative, light and dark coexist. I liken the world to a ball seeking to strike a balance between these opposing forces. Humans and societies are the same way. If you're familiar with esoteric themes, you've probably heard of the seven principles taught by the Greek god Hermes Trimestigus or the Egyptian god Thoth.

The Final Four returns to Arizona for the second time to conclude the 2023-24 season. When the culmination of the college basketball season last emanated from the Grand Canyon State in 2017, it was the first Final Four played West of the Alamo in 22 years. Final Fours from 1949 through 1995 were consistently staged out West, including five in Seattle — three of which were in the Kingdome over an 11-year span from 1984 to 1995.

Andrew Sullivan writes, 2023 showed us the mindless grift of Kendi’s scam at BU, the end of affirmative action in the Ivies, the mediocrity of Claudine Gay, and the racial hatred that will always come when certain entire groups of people are deemed oppressors, and others deemed oppressed. This is not about college crazies. It’s about the core foundations of liberal democracy — which DEI and its guiding philosophy of critical race theory specifically aims to destroy.

In the very first entry here, I referenced The Turning by Leslie Phillips, an album that came into my life in 1987 when I was eleven years old. I had not heard anything like it before. As an already-frustrated preacher’s kid, it was as if she had crawled inside my heart and mind, lifted the things I felt but didn’t have language for, and set them to music. With The Turning, I had the words and permission to feel those repressed emotions.